Feats Of Clay

I don't know if you’re as stunned by the news as I am, but if you are a magazine junkie you know about Felker, the man who created New York magazine, and in so doing really invented the city magazine in America. And by far the best of the city books. I got to thinking about all this the other evening at a book party for Ed Kosner on East 79th Street that drew a number of former New York magazine writers and editors.

And Felker was all any of us, including Ed, really talked about. Felker's been ailing for years, cancer of the mouth and throat, but we knew about that. We also knew how gallantly he was battling, continuing to give his course on magazines at Cal Berkeley and, when unable to lecture, calling on his pals in the biz to guest-lecture while he sat there leading the orchestra and cuing up the journalism stars he was uniquely competent to produce.

But this wasn't the cancer. He'd apparently been down with pneumonia, but once he was released from the hospital they decided he ought to get some aftercare. So he was in a home for the aged in uptown Manhattan.

Kosner, most recently editor of Mort Zuckerman's Daily News in New York, had previously edited Newsweek and Esquire, and was one of several who edited New York following Felker. Even Ed agreed that despite all of us who'd succeeded Felker (nobody really replaced him), it would always be thought of as "Felker's New York."

He was editor of the weekly magazine when it was still part of the Sunday package of the now defunct but once widely read and highly respected New York Herald Tribune. When the Trib was shut down by owner Jock Whitney, Felker believed so strongly in the paper's Sunday mag, he used his own severance pay to buy the rights, getting some rich men around town in New York to pony up the dough to operate it as a standalone weekly.

And boy, did it work! He had some of the staff from the Trib, real pros, but he brought in talented young people, promising, "I'll make you a star," and getting them cheap. But making them stars, by God. What a lineup--Aaron Latham, Tom Wolfe, Richard Reeves, Dick Schaap, Michael Kramer, Jimmy Breslin, John Simon, Pete Hamill, Gail Sheehy, Gael Greene, Walter Bernard, Bill Flanagan, Anna Wintour, Andy Tobias, Ken Auletta and Managing Editor Laurie Jones, the best and the brightest journalists in town practicing what came to be known as "the new journalism."

I even worked there for a time, coming along late when I'd been fired by Hearst and not yet hired by
Rupert
Murdoch
Rupert Murdoch
. Felker bought lunch. Could I create and write a high-toned weekly gossip column he wanted to call "The Intelligencer?" Sure, I could do the job. I needed the dough ($750 a column and no expenses).

On the side I wrote and anchored a one-hour weekly cable television talked show called New York Live. All the writers went on, and the show had a terrific audience since it aired following Knicks and Rangers, and that first year it was nominated for three Emmys and won two. My wages were nonexistent. When I mentioned this to Felker he made elaborate and soothing noises. The networks were watching me; vast and generous offers, broadcast riches were surely impending.

I bought into it. We all did. He was the silver-tongued playboy of the Western world.

A few years later Felker had spun off New West magazine and bought TheVillage Voice. The bottom line board grew restless. Two examples: to furnish the new offices for New West, Felker purchased the set of an Oscar-winning flick, All the President's Men, miming the city room of the The Washington Post, just because he liked the look of it. And when the New York editors he'd sent west for the launch needed cars, he rented a small fleet, not Fords or Chevys but nifty little Alfa Romeos.

When his own directors rebelled and put New York on the block, Murdoch was top bidder. Kay Graham, passionately protective of Felker, pleaded with Murdoch. "Don’t do this to this boy, Rupert." Said Murdoch in wonderment, "That 'boy' is older than I am."